Almost all the artists in this exhibition were branded ‘entartete (‘degenerate’) by the Nazis. They burnt and censored works by the artists closest to my heart. This does not mean, however, that great art was not also produced in the Nazi Reich. The film director Leni Riefenstahl and the architect Albert Speer were the two artists closest to Hitler. They were both – in all likelihood – ardent Nazis, although above all they used the regime to realise their artistic visions. What I like about them is the grandeur of their ideas.

Before Speer came to know Hitler, he once passed the Führer as he was working on an architectural model for the Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg. Speer looked at the model and declared that he could do it much better, whereupon Hitler allowed him to try. Among many other things, Speer was the originator of the tall swastika banners known as standards. According to reports, they were so poorly made that they collapsed the day after the parade.

Speer’s most ambitious project was Germania. It was intended as a total reinvention of Berlin, but the plans came to a halt when the Second World War broke out. Speer worked with the idea of ‘ruin value’, meaning that buildings should be constructed in such a way that, in the future, they would leave behind impressive ruins, like those of ancient Rome. This says something about how far into the future Speer imagined the architecture of the Thousand-Year Reich. The planned Volkshalle was so vast that it was thought meteorological calculations would be required to predict its indoor climate – clouds might even have formed beneath the dome.

Speer’s architecture was a total solution, controlling the experience of the building to the greatest extent possible. Anyone visiting Hitler would pass through long, dark corridors followed by enormous, brightly lit rooms, heightening the effect of monumentality. A widespread story claims that Speer designed the rooms of the Reich Chancellery around the dimensions of carpets that could be produced at the time.

Riefenstahl possessed great technical and aesthetic talent as a film director and made good use of Speer’s architecture. Because Hitler had given her carte blanche for her films, she was able to position countless cameras in the most extraordinary places during filming. She had a particular gift for creating visual drama through montage, which made her films innovative and compelling. Triumph of the Will and Olympia, in particular, are central works in film history, within both the documentary and propaganda genres.

One should distinguish between, on the one hand, Nazi politics and its view of humanity, and, on the other, the art that emerged because Hitler gave two major artistic talents completely free rein.